In My Mother's Kitchen: Pea Soup
To this point, I haven't really written much about the soups that my mother made, beyond Matzo Ball Soup and chicken broth. Since my mother had several other soups that were in my her regular rotation, it is time to address that lack. We will lead with pea soup.
Pea Soup
6 cups water
--Optional: bouillon cube or broth
1 pound dried green split peas
1 large onion, sliced
1/2 cup celery, chopped
1 tbsp dried parlsey
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp oregano
pinch of thyme
3 large carrots or parsnips, peeled and chunked.
--Optional: 3 large potatoes, chunked.
--Optional: ham chunks, kielbasa or polish sausage.
Salt & Pepper to taste
1. Bring water/broth/bouillon to boil and add peas. Cover and shut off burner. Let sit for one hour.
2. While waiting, cook the carrots and parsnips and potatoes, if using. Boiling them is fine.
3. Add onion, celery, parsley, garlic powder, bay leaf, oregano and thyme. Bring to boil then simmer covered until peas are soft, about 60 minutes.
4. Remove bay leaf. Use immersion blender to blend soup to liquid.
5. Add cooked carrots, parsnips and potatoes as well as any meat being used.
6. Add salt and pepper to taste. It can be a bit bland, so I recommend adding a lot of salt and pepper.
My mother never used parsnips or potatoes that I can remember, but she included them in the recipe. As best as I can recall she mostly used ham, but the memory is vague, as you can tell when I said that Ham in Orange-Mustard Sauce was the only recipe we ever had with ham in it. I usually don't add meat nowadays. When my mother prepared my cook book, the recipe includes detailed instructions on how to use cooked frozen spinach to make the soup even greener, but I'm pretty sure I've never tried it when I have made it adulthood.
Beyond the variant ingredients, my mother also included in the recipe complicated instructions on how to blend the soup in batches in a blender, but an immersion blender is much easier, much faster, reduces the number of dirty dishes and generally makes all of that moot. She also talked about how you can thin the soup with water or milk, but honestly my experience is that you are more likely to regret putting too few vegetables in it than the other way around. I've reworked this recipe to be made in a crock pot, and frankly it should be pretty doable in an instant pot as well.
I think the big takeaway here is that for those occasions when I post my mother's recipes here, I do a substantial amount of rewriting. This particular recipe has some substantial revisions, but at the very least most of them have been redone to have all the ingredients up front. I'm not sure that my mother ever really looked at recipes. My recollection is that she had a few baking recipes where the precise ingredients mattered, but for most of the rest of them, I don't know that she ever really looked at the recipes, even for the ones that lived in her cookbook collection. There were definitely several that were never written down until she started working part-time in the evenings and assigned my sister or I to cook. In some cases we would have to call her at work to ask for clarifications. Some times those were because we were inexperienced cooks, and other times it was because my mother hadn't actually tested the recipe as written and didn't realize that the text didn't make sense to someone who hadn't made it a few dozen times prior.
My childhood memories were of a large but finite list of recipes in my mother's regular rotation. I do not remember a lot of new recipes coming out of those cookbooks. If that memory is accurate I wonder how much of that was a reaction to dealing with the palate of children, or the time crunch of dealing with children. As I've noted in this series, my sister was a little bit picky and I was less so, but still both of us were far less picky then the stories you hear of children who will only eat a small subset of foods, and it is not like my mother hesitated to feed us food she knew for sure that we did not care for. On the other hand, we were not kids who were constantly being shuttled to the array of activities that you hear about nowadays. Aside from swim lessons and Hebrew school and an occasional daytime summer camp, I do not recall much that our mother regularly drove us to, so if my mother hadn't wanted to spend more time cooking new recipes she had the time once my sister hit elementary school.
Her remembered (and perhaps imagined) reticence to making new recipes certainly wasn't because of my father, who will enthusiastically eat anything my mother prepares. I once asked my father if she had ever made something he didn't like, and when pressed he remembered some recipe she had tried on him back when they lived in New York after getting married, and even that he framed as "it was not good enough to make again." If happiness is marrying a good cook, then my father is among the happiest of men. In any event, at some point after we moved out of the house my mother started getting Eating Well magazine, and we have gotten her cookbooks as gifts, and she does try new things with some regularity.
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.
Technically pea soup is not the same as pease porridge, but I did like it better cold as leftovers than I did hot out out of the pot. Cold, it gets thicker thick and was more filling, and I personally felt that the taste improved as time went on. Of course, it should be noted that I am a little bit weird in that I never heat up leftovers for lunch, with one exception that will come next week. I have always been like this and cannot explain why. Many other people think I am weird for doing this. If nothing else, this preference for cold leftovers has saved me a lot of time waiting for a microwave in the diner at work.
Pea Soup
6 cups water
--Optional: bouillon cube or broth
1 pound dried green split peas
1 large onion, sliced
1/2 cup celery, chopped
1 tbsp dried parlsey
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp oregano
pinch of thyme
3 large carrots or parsnips, peeled and chunked.
--Optional: 3 large potatoes, chunked.
--Optional: ham chunks, kielbasa or polish sausage.
Salt & Pepper to taste
1. Bring water/broth/bouillon to boil and add peas. Cover and shut off burner. Let sit for one hour.
2. While waiting, cook the carrots and parsnips and potatoes, if using. Boiling them is fine.
3. Add onion, celery, parsley, garlic powder, bay leaf, oregano and thyme. Bring to boil then simmer covered until peas are soft, about 60 minutes.
4. Remove bay leaf. Use immersion blender to blend soup to liquid.
5. Add cooked carrots, parsnips and potatoes as well as any meat being used.
6. Add salt and pepper to taste. It can be a bit bland, so I recommend adding a lot of salt and pepper.
My mother never used parsnips or potatoes that I can remember, but she included them in the recipe. As best as I can recall she mostly used ham, but the memory is vague, as you can tell when I said that Ham in Orange-Mustard Sauce was the only recipe we ever had with ham in it. I usually don't add meat nowadays. When my mother prepared my cook book, the recipe includes detailed instructions on how to use cooked frozen spinach to make the soup even greener, but I'm pretty sure I've never tried it when I have made it adulthood.
Beyond the variant ingredients, my mother also included in the recipe complicated instructions on how to blend the soup in batches in a blender, but an immersion blender is much easier, much faster, reduces the number of dirty dishes and generally makes all of that moot. She also talked about how you can thin the soup with water or milk, but honestly my experience is that you are more likely to regret putting too few vegetables in it than the other way around. I've reworked this recipe to be made in a crock pot, and frankly it should be pretty doable in an instant pot as well.
I think the big takeaway here is that for those occasions when I post my mother's recipes here, I do a substantial amount of rewriting. This particular recipe has some substantial revisions, but at the very least most of them have been redone to have all the ingredients up front. I'm not sure that my mother ever really looked at recipes. My recollection is that she had a few baking recipes where the precise ingredients mattered, but for most of the rest of them, I don't know that she ever really looked at the recipes, even for the ones that lived in her cookbook collection. There were definitely several that were never written down until she started working part-time in the evenings and assigned my sister or I to cook. In some cases we would have to call her at work to ask for clarifications. Some times those were because we were inexperienced cooks, and other times it was because my mother hadn't actually tested the recipe as written and didn't realize that the text didn't make sense to someone who hadn't made it a few dozen times prior.
My childhood memories were of a large but finite list of recipes in my mother's regular rotation. I do not remember a lot of new recipes coming out of those cookbooks. If that memory is accurate I wonder how much of that was a reaction to dealing with the palate of children, or the time crunch of dealing with children. As I've noted in this series, my sister was a little bit picky and I was less so, but still both of us were far less picky then the stories you hear of children who will only eat a small subset of foods, and it is not like my mother hesitated to feed us food she knew for sure that we did not care for. On the other hand, we were not kids who were constantly being shuttled to the array of activities that you hear about nowadays. Aside from swim lessons and Hebrew school and an occasional daytime summer camp, I do not recall much that our mother regularly drove us to, so if my mother hadn't wanted to spend more time cooking new recipes she had the time once my sister hit elementary school.
Her remembered (and perhaps imagined) reticence to making new recipes certainly wasn't because of my father, who will enthusiastically eat anything my mother prepares. I once asked my father if she had ever made something he didn't like, and when pressed he remembered some recipe she had tried on him back when they lived in New York after getting married, and even that he framed as "it was not good enough to make again." If happiness is marrying a good cook, then my father is among the happiest of men. In any event, at some point after we moved out of the house my mother started getting Eating Well magazine, and we have gotten her cookbooks as gifts, and she does try new things with some regularity.
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.
Technically pea soup is not the same as pease porridge, but I did like it better cold as leftovers than I did hot out out of the pot. Cold, it gets thicker thick and was more filling, and I personally felt that the taste improved as time went on. Of course, it should be noted that I am a little bit weird in that I never heat up leftovers for lunch, with one exception that will come next week. I have always been like this and cannot explain why. Many other people think I am weird for doing this. If nothing else, this preference for cold leftovers has saved me a lot of time waiting for a microwave in the diner at work.